Eph. 4:17-31
Good morning! We’re in the second half of chapter 4 in Ephesians today. This week and next week’s passages, Ephesians 4:17-5:20 form a two-part message on how we are to live as followers of Christ, how we are to relate to others.
We live in a broken world. As the years pass, it feels like the world has less and less unity. There are more conflicts globally. More broken homes. More political strife. More division about how to view and understand the world. More violence. More persecution.
The book of Ephesians is a reminder that this is not where the world is ultimately headed. Ephesians 1:10 tells us that Christ is returning to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, Himself. And, we certainly look forward to that!
For those who hear the word of truth about Jesus and believe, Ephesians 1:13 tells us that we are included in Christ now. Ephesians 3:6 says that through the gospel, believers are sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.
And so during this time between Jesus’ ascension and His return, it is the age of the church. Jesus is head of the church. His church should exemplify the unity that Christ will bring to all things at His return. What should that look like?
Our passage last week (Ephesians 4:1-16) gave us two goals for the church. My study bible called them twin goals. And in that passage Paul weaves them one into the other almost in a kind of dance. Unity and maturity.
We are to “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace,” (v.3) while Christ gives apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, “to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up.“ (v.12)
And this building up shall continue, “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature.” (v.13) “We will no longer be infants.” Corporately, together, “we will grow to become in every respect the mature body.”
Today, we’re going to get into the how’s and what’s. What to do and what not to do, and how to do it. Most important of all is the Who? Who makes it all possible? Christ Jesus from whom, “the whole body … grows and builds itself up in love.”
Let’s pray and get into today’s passage.
Thank You Jesus that You are the One. The One who builds up the church. The One who sends us teachers and prophets and pastors and evangelists and apostles. Thank You that You are with us through Your Holy Spirit. We worship You. Teach us what to do and how to live. We pray in Your Name Jesus, Amen.
So that last phrase I shared before we prayed is the end of verse 16. “From [Christ] the whole body … grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” Keep that in mind as we go into verse 17.
So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. – Eph. 4:17-18
Okay. We’re starting with what not to do. If we’re going to grow and be built up in love, we’re going to have to stop what? Living as the Gentiles do. How is that? In the futility of their thinking.
Romans 1 gets into this in great detail. Starting in verse 22, it says that the ungodly people claimed to be wise, but instead they became fools mainly by exchanging the glory of God for idols. As a result, God gave them over to their sinful desires, specifically sexual impurity that further devolved into unnatural sexual relations. As they did not retain the knowledge of God, God allowed that way of thinking to run its course. They were “filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice; gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; inventing ways of doing evil; disobedient of their parents.” These people who reject God “have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.”
That matches with what we see in verse 18 above. “They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God.” Why? Because of their ignorance. Why are they ignorant? They have hardened their hearts. The easiest way to explain hardening your heart is to stop listening to God. To reject Him and His truth.
So, Paul is insisting that we don’t do that. Stay attentive and soft toward God. Desire to know what He’s like, what He’s doing.
Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed. That, however, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. – Eph. 4:19-21
In large part, we have covered what verse 19 is telling us when we looked at Romans 1. The only other thought is that this verse reminds me of the phrase used in II Peter 2:12 and Jude 1:10. In both places, it is talking about people who speak evil, defile the flesh, reject the truth. It compares them to “brute beasts” destined for slaughter. Yikes!
As we get further into today’s passage, we’re going to see that good and bad or bad and good choices are contrasted against one another. So, if we apply that kind of thinking to what we see here, we should strive to keep our sensitivity, exercise self-control, be generous, and indulge purity. I don’t know how to indulge purity. When I went and looked at the Greek, the word indulge really means to practice or to work at. That fits better. We can practice purity. We can work at purity.
Because we have learned a better way of life. We have learned from the One who is the way, the truth, and the life.
Rebekah, my daughter, bought me a North Greenville t-shirt when she was in school there. That was pre-COVID, more than four years ago. I’ve worn it a good bit, and it’s starting to get a little bit ragged. I was wearing yesterday, in fact. It has a picture of the NGU logo. It has the name of the school. Then, at the bottom, it has their motto.
Shameless plug. There are all sorts of educational institutions. Public, private, Christian. I’ve also joked that with seven children, we have enough kids to have statistics. We’ve had kids take different educational paths over the years. So far, two have had at least some education at two different Christian universities. And, there’s a lot of good I can say about them for shaping character, framing a Christian worldview, sparking and inspiring vision to do many of the things we’re talking about in this Ephesians passage. I have been impressed, and I am grateful for these institutions.
Okay, that was a story in a story. Remember the t-shirt. The motto. It’s “Christ makes the difference.” That is crucial. He is the one who makes the difference in the way of life that we live. My study bible also contrasted Paul’s choice to use Christ and Jesus separately in the same sentence. Theologians have submitted that Paul chose to say Jesus when he wrote the way of life “in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus” because he wants to point us to the life that Jesus lived on earth before His resurrection and ascension. Jesus did it. He lived the life that we need to live. He is our example.
You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. – Eph. 4:22-24
Be like Him. That is today’s title. That’s the goal for each of us.
Thankfully, some of you may be saying, “Well, I don’t really have that much of a former way of life before I trusted Christ,” because you were children when you put your faith in Him. As a result, you might wonder about the need to put off your old self. Do I need to do that?
There’s a certain recurring nature to this old-self / new-self business. It’s like that last phrase about being made new in the attitude of your minds. That kind of hearkens back to Romans 12:2, “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” We need to be renewed in our thinking again and again.
We are still “in the flesh.” And I can see that my flesh is aging, being corrupted by the consequence of sin and the Fall. I think we can also realize when we are walking around in our spiritual “old self”. Being selfish, being a grouch, not believing the best of others. We need to put off our old self and put on our new self. It’s like mentally changing clothes. Take off the old dirty things. Put on the new clean ones.
On Easter Sunday, I usually wear a white shirt. Years ago, I had to lead worship and teach on Easter. I grabbed what I thought was my good white shirt, put it on, and came to church. At some point in the course of the morning, I realized I didn’t have my good white shirt on. I had an older shirt. Not only a bit worn in the color and cuffs, it had a stain on it. I couldn’t believe it. Why did I keep that shirt when I already had another good one! We’re not talking about a t-shirt or even a shirt I would wear to work. A white button-down dress shirt. Needless to say, that after I made the best of the situation and used it as a show-and-tell sermon illustration, I went home and threw it away.
I don’t know why God decided to make it this way, that we can’t exactly throw away our old ways of thinking, that we can revert back to them. How then can we hope to reliably put on our new self?
One of the themes of Ephesians is power. Specifically, the power of God. Chapter 1 tells of His “incomparably great power for us who believe.” It’s the same power that raised Jesus from the dead. I’m not just saying that. That’s Ephesians 1:19-20. In chapter 3, we are reminded again of God’s mighty power, including the fact that “His power is at work within us.” Finally, (I know it’s jumping ahead) Ephesians 6:10 tells us to “be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power.” So, it really is like changing clothes. Because God’s power is at work within us to allow us to be successful in living the life that He has called us to.
The next verses are short ones, but I decided to separate them on the slides because they focus on different areas. Now that we have put on our new selves that were “created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.”
Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body. – Eph. 4:25
Paul chose to write neighbor here, but the context tells us that he means the ones who are members of the one body. We, as believers, should not lie to one another. Hopefully, that’s not too difficult. If it does happen, that you lie to a brother or sister, then you should confess, apologize, and tell the truth.
We probably do need to have some care around speaking truthfully. Some of you don’t need any encouragement, those of you can remember that everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak. Others though are not big on confrontation. You’ll see my fear come up later. It’s too easy for me to get angry. So, confrontations can be a high-risk situation for me. If I don’t want to lose my cool, then it seems logical to avoid speaking truthfully. That’s not the only reason people have to avoid speaking truth. Fear is another reason. All kinds of fear. Fear of sounding dumb, fear of not saying it right, fear of what the other person might think or do.
This is going to come out wrong, but at a certain point, you just have to put aside the fear of looking dumb because it’s just going to happen. You’re going to look dumb at some point or other.
I have a tough situation with a project at work. It’s just not getting done. The main engineer working on it has been really anxious about it, putting the blame on himself, and offering to go in front of whatever firing line there might be. I wrote him an email on Friday really telling him the situation on the commitments that have been communicated outwardly which once I got to looking weren’t that bad.
After I wrote that, I then realized that I was the one who had presented this project to the plant manager and other external executives. I was the one that said that the project would be done in October, and then November, and then December, and then January. Digging into the project and working with the engineer to make a realistic aggressive timeline on Friday, I’m pretty confident that we are going to finish before March.
I realized then that I am the one who looks like an idiot, at least on this one project. I was equally surprised to realize that it really didn’t bother me all that much. Because, when I had said the project was going to be done all those different times, I had been telling the truth. I was just wrong. There is something important about telling the truth. If you don’t tell the truth and say nothing, how will you learn, how will the other person learn, how will wrongs be righted, how will hurts be healed? If you have something on your heart that needs said, pray about it, seek counsel if you need to, but speak truthfully with one another. If we don’t, then our body won’t be whole and healthy.
"In your anger do not sin": Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold. – Eph. 4:26-27
See, I told you anger would be on the list. Anger is not always wrong. It is a strong emotion though, so it is easy to jump from it into sin. Whether or not the anger is righteous, we are told not to let it persist beyond the day. If we hold on to our anger, it really does give the devil a foothold.
If one of the key goals of the church is unity, then one of Satan’s main points of attack is going to be to sow division. If you are angry with a brother or sister, and you hold on to that anger without addressing it, then you run the risk of giving the devil a foothold.
If you’re angry because someone has sinned against you, then you need to approach them about it. If you can’t go by yourself, then take another brother or sister. If you’re angry about a situation you can’t control or where it is not possible to approach the person, or where you are being overly sensitive, take it to the Lord. At some point, you will have to release your anger. That doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting what happened, especially if there is a risk of it happening again. But, do not hold on to the anger. Proverbs 19:11 tells us a persons wisdom yields patience, “it’s to their glory to overlook an offense.”
Anyone who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands, that they may have something to share with those in need. – Eph. 4:28
I probably need to pick up speed. This is one of the verses which shows a stop bad – start good contrast. The thief should not only stop his stealing, but he should also start working so that he can bless others who are in need. Stop being stingy and start being generous.
Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. – Eph. 4:29
When I was a student and a younger believer, we had a two-word paraphrase for this verse. It’ll stick with you, so I’m a little reluctant in sharing it. We summed up Ephesians 4:29 as “Edify, stupid.” It’s a bad joke because we are told here, “do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths.”
If you have a question about what is unwholesome, then contrast it with how we should address one another. If something isn’t helpful for building others up according to their needs, then it’s probably unwholesome in some way.
That last little phrase has a significant practical application. If you speak in ways that build someone up, it benefits not only the person you are building up, but it benefits anyone who is listening.
Going back to the speaking truthfully point, if you have something on your heart that blesses or encourages, then by all means share it. It will bless them, it will bless you, and it will bless anyone else that is listening.
There was a book called the 10-Second Rule published about ten years ago. The goal of the book was to encourage moment-by-moment obedience to Jesus. If you felt like the Spirit was prompting you to do or say something, you needed to take action within ten seconds or else it wasn’t obedience.
If the something you’re feeling led to do is good or encouraging, I would say that the ten second rule is okay, but if you are going to confront someone or share something that might not be taken the right way or you’re trying to communicate something to someone who you may have had a hard time being on the same page with, then the ten second rule might not be appropriate. The tongue is a troublemaker and cannot be tamed, just look at James 3:1-12.
And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. – Eph. 4:30
Looking to the verse before, unwholesome talk would grieve the Spirit. Let me tell you something funny. I don’t think I can always perceive whether or not something I say grieves the Spirit in my heart or my mind. But, I do get a sensation, a physical one. I don’t have as much hair as I used to. If I say some sharp retort that I have no business making, my scalp will flush, like a micro-flush for a second or less. Either the Spirit has allowed that to develop over time, or since I have less dense hair on my scalp, I can feel it. Maybe God is showing you somehow when you’re out of bounds. If you can pick up on it, use that to train yourself. Or just ask a brother or sister to “elbow” you.
Looking forward, we are going to come back to anger of all kinds. These too grieves the Spirit.
There’s one other interesting point in this verse which we should not miss. You can only grieve a person. This verse speaks to the personhood of the Holy Spirit. If you were wondering where the bible communicates that the Holy Spirit is a person, this is a good one. Of course, John 14-16 is probably more thorough.
Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. – Eph. 4:31
Anger is a big deal. So much so that Paul was led to repeat and expand it here. Every form of anger. Internal anger in the form of bitterness. External anger by raised voice in the form of rage. External anger by physical force in the form of brawling. External anger by talking bad about someone in the form of slander. Internal anger by desiring pain, injury, or distress to someone by every form of malice. Get rid of all of it. And instead …
Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. – Eph. 4:32
This is a high contrast to the preceding verse about anger. Be kind. Be compassionate. Forgive one another. Not just a little bit, not just lip service, but forgive as God forgave you in Christ. Whoa! That’s a big forgiveness. Big enough to cover the sin of the whole world.
We’re supposed to end here, but I’m going to sneak over into the first verse of chapter 5. I think Brian is teaching next week. Brian, you can use as many of my verses from chapter 4 as you want.
Therefore, be imitators of God, as dearly loved children. – Eph. 5:1
I feel like this is such a good conclusion for what has come before, and our message title.
The world would tell us to stand up for ourselves. The world tells us that the ends justify the means. Elijah and I were watching an old Woody Woodpecker cartoon, and the title character was just cruel to another character in the cartoon just because he was scared. It wasn’t for a moment. That was the point of the entire cartoon. Based on the animation, I expect was a cartoon from the 1960’s, but still both Elijah and I were surprised by the unprovoked meanness of a “good guy.” The world was telling us, it’s okay to be mean as long as you laugh about it. Imitating the world or sinful desires is not in keeping with the new life in us.
After working through these verses for a while, I came to see the last phrase a bit differently than I had before. As Jesus told us in Mark 10:15 (and Luke 18:17), we need to have faith like little children to enter the kingdom of God. Following the lessons from today’s passage, we also need to be like little children.
Little children can be so very cute when they imitate their parents. In those moments, they are dearly loved for the honor they show.
When we put our faith in Christ, we become children of God. He can’t love us more or love us less. When we seek to imitate him by turning away from sin and doing good as Ephesians 4 shows us, then we are acting as dearly loved children. The ones who show honor by trying to be like their parents. Let’s be like Him.
Let’s pray.
Father God, thank You that Your Spirit is in us. Thank You that Your mighty power is at work within us. Help us each one to live out the words of Ephesians 4. Glorify Your Name through us we pray in Jesus’ Name, Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment